>> I've talked to Chris Rock and Larry the Cable Guy,
they don't even wanna do college campuses anymore.
>> I hear that all the time.
I don't play colleges, but
I hear a lot of people tell me don't go near colleges, they're so PC.
>> Censor not, lest you be censored.
The offensive speech of one generation is often the freedom movement of the next.
This can result in a never-ending cycle where the roles of oppressor and
oppressed switch back and forth.
Speech about sex is probably the most instructive
example of this historical process.
Sexually provocative speech and
images remain largely unprotected by the First Amendment until the 1950s.
Even James Joyce's classic tome Ulysses was banned in the United States for
obscenity, as was D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.
But then in a series of Supreme Court cases,
spurred both by the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
And by a strong interpretation of the First Amendment, sexual speech gradually
earned its proper place among the kind of speech that should be protected.
An early high watermark for acceptance of sexual expression or low Point depends on
your point of view, came with the 1972 mass release of the XXX film, Deep Throat.
What's hard for a lot of people to fathom today is that Deep Throat was shown in
many mainstream theaters across the country.
This permissiveness did not last long, the sexually open minded 70s gave way to
the more conservative 80s and a strange coalition started brewing between
social conservatives and anti pornography feminists like Catharine MacKinnon.
The seemingly opposing groups agreed for
different reasons that pornography was dangerous and should be stopped.
We see this strange double mindedness on campuses today.
While universities often like to show themselves as being progressive by
supporting sex positive speech, they are also increasingly clamping down on
sexually explicit speech, imagery and even jokes.
A second type of expression where norms were once very constrained were then
liberalized and now seem to be going back in the Victorian direction is comedy.
Famed comedian Lenny Bruce was sentence to prison for
his racy comedy act in the 1960s.
But after he died,
the right to offend comedy not only became widely accepted, but expected.
This idea prevailed for several decades.
However, the pendulum seems to be swinging back, particularly on college campuses.
And this time, it is not the police or feds who are demanding inoffensive comedy.
It's students.
Even comedians as prominent as Chris Rock and
the late great George Carlin said that they didn't like playing college campuses,
because these venues have become too uptight.
For the last few decades the idea that you should not censor expression you dislike,
because one day,
you could be the censored seems to be falling on deaf ears on campus.
The truest support of free speech is to defend those ideas and yes, jokes and
pictures that we may hate.
Not out of concern for the protection of the ideas we love, but
because we prefer to live in an open society rather than a closed one.